{"id":444,"date":"2018-06-13T00:00:52","date_gmt":"2018-06-13T04:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsinteractive.post-gazette.com\/distinction\/?p=444"},"modified":"2018-06-14T15:14:46","modified_gmt":"2018-06-14T19:14:46","slug":"queen-etta-legendary-jazz-singer-plays-one-in-king-hedley-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsinteractive.post-gazette.com\/distinction\/2018\/arts-entertainment\/queen-etta-legendary-jazz-singer-plays-one-in-king-hedley-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"QUEEN ETTA: Legendary jazz singer plays one in ‘King Hedley II’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Etta <\/a>
Etta Cox waits to sing before a capacity crowd at Alphabet City on the North Side. (Nate Guidry\/Post-Gazette) <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Etta <\/a>
Etta Cox as “Ruby” during a rehearsal Sunday, April 22, 2018, of a Pittsburgh Playwrights production of “King Hedley II” at August Wilson’s boyhood home in the Hill District. (Nate Guidry\/Post-Gazette.) (Nate Guidry\/Post-Gazette.) <\/div> <\/div>
\"Leslie <\/a>
Leslie Ezra Smith portrays King, the son of former big band singer Ruby, played by Etta Cox, during rehearsal of Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company production of “King Hedley II” at August Wilson’s boyhood home in the Hill District. Mr. Smith left the production before it opened. (Nate Guidry\/Post-Gazette) <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Etta <\/a>
Etta Cox performs at Pittsburgh’s Bicentennial Birthday Bash near a re-creation of the Crawford Grill at the Heinz History Center in July 2016. She performed once at the real Crawford Grill in the Hill District. (Rebecca Droke\/Post-Gazette) <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Etta <\/a>
Etta Cox found a new sense of freedom when she became a jazz singer. “Jazz is complete improvisation — melody and a way to feel,\u201d she says. (Nate Guidry\/Post-Gazette) <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n

Etta Cox knows her way around a song. So does Ruby, a character in \u201cKing Hedley II,\u201d the next-to-last play in August Wilson\u2019s Pittsburgh cycle.<\/p>\n

Ms. Cox plays Ruby in the Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company production of the play, which opened May 11 at Mr. Wilson\u2019s birthplace in the Hill District. But she feels no kinship with a former big band singer in her 60s who has quit singing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not there yet,\u201d she said in a recent interview near her North Side home. \u201cI try to make each gig a new experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

She is known as a jazz singer, but jazz is not the music she grew up with. As a girl in St. Joseph, Mo., Etta Green sang gospel, classical and other popular styles.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was 6, I played piano and sang a country-western song. People clapped when I finished. They really liked when I sang!\u201d<\/p>\n

She and other kids in her racially mixed neighborhood put on shows in her basement. It was lots of singing and dancing with no audience. It didn\u2019t prepare her for her first real stage performance, in which she was accompanied on piano by her older sister, Florence Boldridge.<\/p>\n

\u201cI looked at my teacher and ran offstage!\u201d<\/p>\n

She still suffered from stage fright until she was 12, when she began taking voice lessons, singing classical songs. That didn\u2019t play well at the mostly black middle school she attended.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was getting in a lot of fights,\u201d she said. \u201cPeople didn\u2019t like the way I sang.\u201d<\/p>\n

The character Ruby appears first in another August Wilson play, \u201cSeven Guitars,\u201d set in the 1940s. After one of her boyfriends kills another, 25-year-old Ruby flees Alabama and makes a new start in Pittsburgh. The playwright describes her this way: \u201cAn uncommon woman, she exudes a sensuality that is electric. Everyone stops to look at her.\u201d<\/p>\n

RUBY: \u201cThen they got into a fight. I tried to tell them Ruby don\u2019t belong to nobody and Ruby ain\u2019t gonna take but so much of anybody.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014 Act 2, Scene 2, \u201cSeven Guitars\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Angelic voices<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Etta was in seventh grade, James and Helen Green sent their younger daughter to a Catholic school where she was one of only two black students. At her first Mass, when the other students went to receive Holy Communion, she joined them.<\/p>\n

\u201cA nun came and put a cloak over me. She said, \u2018Etta, you\u2019re not Catholic. You can\u2019t get Communion.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet she loved the music and joined the cathedral choir.<\/p>\n

\u201cI learned to sing in Latin. I loved Gregorian chant. It was so sacred to me, those angelic voices.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the school, she learned patience \u2014 and something much less angelic.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had never seen such cheating. The girls wrote answers on their arms and under their skirts!\u201d<\/p>\n

Her father, a bartender, choir member and deacon at New Hope Baptist Church, took her to their church on Sundays. He sometimes worked fancy parties with her mother, a part-time caterer who was a dietitian at the state hospital. Eighteen-year-old Etta sang at some parties.\u00a0\u201cIt was pretty decent pay.\u201d<\/p>\n

While her sister studied piano at a conservatory in Chicago, Ms. Cox won a scholarship to Mount St. Scholastica, a Catholic women\u2019s college in Atchison, Kan., that later merged with a men\u2019s school to become Benedictine College. A vocal and music education major, the soprano became a member of Peaches & Cream, a college band. And she met a man from St. Louis.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was engaged at 19. I didn\u2019t tell anyone. I hid the ring,\u201d Ms. Cox said.<\/p>\n

RUBY: \u201cYou was supposed to be there. I always felt that. I got to have somebody, too. I saw you and said you was supposed to be mine.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014 Act 1, Scene 3, \u201cKing Hedley II\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Hello Dolly<\/strong><\/p>\n

One month after her college graduation, they were married and moved to St. Louis. Ms. Cox got a job teaching music at an East St. Louis public school. During summer vacation, she performed at Six Flags amusement park in nearby Eureka \u2014 seven shows a day, seven days a week.<\/p>\n

\u201cI sang stuff from Broadway shows, \u2018Hello Dolly,\u2019 that kind of thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Cox was not happy when her husband was transferred to Pittsburgh for work. \u201cI was told it\u2019s dark all the time. They turn the streetlights on at noon.\u201d<\/p>\n

But her arrival after a 14-hour drive from Missouri gave her hope. \u201cWe came through the Fort Pitt Tunnel at night and bam! I was so impressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

They stayed the first night at the Holiday Inn in Green Tree and had a few drinks in the lounge.<\/p>\n

\u201cA band was playing. My husband said, \u2018My wife\u2019s a singer,\u2019 and they let me do a song. I sang \u2018I Feel the Earth Move\u2019 and I did splits. Everyone was clapping. I think they were wondering, \u2018Who was that drunken singer?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Cox decided if she was going to be stuck in Pittsburgh, she might as well sing. Her husband introduced her to Al Dowe, a trombonist and bandleader, and she sang with his band at the Troianis\u2019 Landmark 1836 restaurant on Fourth Avenue, Downtown.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe band played jazz \u2014 I didn\u2019t sing jazz! I sang \u2018Misty\u2019 because that was the only jazz song I knew.\u201d<\/p>\n

The couple lived in Pennsbury Village, and she performed with Bob Curry\u2019s band and Thom Thomas\u2019 Odd Chair Playhouse in Bethel Park. Mr. Dowe already had a singer, but he liked her voice and the way she looked in front of his band. To teach her jazz, he loaned her records by Nancy Wilson, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first tune she heard was Nancy Wilson\u2019s \u2018Guess Who I Saw Today?\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cShe heard it and flipped!\u201d<\/p>\n

The records opened up a new world for the singer.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt a freedom in jazz that I had never experienced before. Jazz is complete improvisation \u2014 melody and a way to feel.\u201d<\/p>\n

RUBY: \u201cI always did like to sing. Seem like that was a better way of talking. You could put more meaning to it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014 Act 2, Scene 3, \u201cKing Hedley II\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The Big Apple<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ms. Cox was singing nights and working days as a secretary Downtown at Rockwell International. For several years, she sang with the Civic Light Opera, mostly in the chorus, for \u201cBrigadoon,\u201d \u201cA Little Night Music\u201d and other shows.<\/p>\n

Then-Post-Gazette entertainment editor George Anderson described how she got up at 6 a.m. Fridays to work a full day at Rockwell, then performed a two-hour show, \u201cA Couple of Swells\u201d with Lenora Nemetz at Walt Harper\u2019s Attic. Her day ended at 1 a.m. with Mr. Dowe\u2019s quintet at Ernie\u2019s Esquire, a dinner-dance club in McMurray.<\/p>\n

Rockwell president Willard F. Rockwell Jr., who was also a CLO board member, allowed Ms. Cox to take a summer off and try to make it as a singer in New York City. Shortly after she arrived, she won a part in the Broadway musical \u201cI Love My Wife\u201d with an all-black cast. It closed after eight weeks.<\/p>\n

She also auditioned for \u201cThe 1940\u2019s Radio Hour\u201d and became understudy to Dee Dee Bridgewater. To make ends meet, Ms. Cox worked as a receptionist for the jeweler Cartier. She was told to serve tea on a silver platter to the executives. She refused. \u201cI thought it was demeaning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Drugs were prevalent in New York, she said. In a recording session, the crew took a \u201ccoke break\u201d one day. She thought they meant the cola.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a mirror with a pile of coke, and they were all gathered \u2019round!\u201d<\/p>\n

Deciding she wanted to focus on jazz singing, Ms. Cox returned to Pittsburgh but continued to audition for shows in New York and took voice and dance lessons there.\u00a0Her husband was no longer proud of her. \u201cHe told me, \u2018Nobody likes your singing!\u2019\u201d He showed up one evening at a club, she said, and struck her after the show.\u00a0\u201cThe next day I filed for divorce.\u201d<\/p>\n

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